Death Stars: Population

The Death Stars are the greatest technological wonders of the STAR WARS
galaxy.
This page is examines their dimensions, structure, function and capabilities.
It is a synthesis and conciliation of existing knowledge and also uses numerous illustrations and calculations to explore previously unknown aspects of the
Death Star space stations.

There are serious problems of scale with the figures for the crew and troop
complements of the Death Stars as claimed by
West End Games sources.
Assuming their favourite personnel number estimates, and using their
demonstrably erroneous diameters of merely 120km and 160km,
the densities of humans on the surface of each battle station were about
twenty-six and thirty-one per square kilometre, respectively.
This assumes that all of the Death Star inhabitants lived on the same surface
level.
In fact we know that these battle stations contained at least several thousand
floors, even if the habitable zone only extends from the upper few kilometres
from the surface.
If these Death Star population estimates were correct then either the
corridors would be so empty that a chance encounter with a stormtrooper would
be virtually impossible, or else habitation only covered a few isolated
surface areas.
If the battle station is inhabited in such a sparse or patchy fashion
then it could be dangerously vulnerable to saboutage,
or serious malfunctions could occur without being noticed.
When we take physically realistic estimates for the sizes of the Death Stars,
the population densities (again assuming only one storey)
would drop to below one
lonely human being per square kilometer!

The population of 31,622,963 postulated for the
Death Star I
in The Technical Book of Science Fiction Films
is much more reasonable
For the small size of the station assumed in this book, this means a surface
density of crewman of 2217.46 / km².
However the crew live and work on at least hundreds of layered decks throughout
at least the top few kilometres of the the station's skin.
Thus we still have problems with underpopulated corridors.

Realistic crew and troop populations for the Death Stars must be at least
several thousand times the previously published estimates.
Each of these battle stations probably carried a few billion military personnel.
Given that the Galactic Empire is able to recruit from millions of worlds which
typically have populations of billions, this is still only a miniscule fraction
of the galaxy's total resources.
It should be remembered that there exist totalitarian states on Earth where
a substantial proportion of the total population is in military service.
The Galactic Empire is probably a relatively under-militarised society by
comparison.

It is noteworthy that almost all the gross underestimates of Death Star
population are actually contained within documents authored by members of the
Rebel Alliance [in ntrinsic terms within the STAR WARS universe].
The Movie Trilogy Sourcebook is written from the vantage of
a rebel "historian" (retrospective propagandist) Voren Na'al.
The Death Star Technical Companion seems to be a document aimed
at rebel diplomats, officers and soldiers, at least according to hints like the
appendix preamble on p.84.
It is understandable that the propagandists of the Rebel Alliance and the
New Republic might wish to belittle these intimidating accomplishments of
Imperial military engineering, and to promulagte underestimates of the
slaughter at Yavin, which a rational semi-quantitative analysis
suggests to be comparable in
magnitude to the holocaust at Alderaan.

Mandel blueprints with a pre-SWRPG estimate of the Death Star population,
but gross underestimates of the station's size and mass.